But the photograph does not record a mere unreflective transplantation of Greek ethnicity into the host national space. It represents not the intrusion of a foreign body, but a negotiation that becomes evident once one decodes the additional signs that nuance the visual enactment of cultural and ethnic (racial) continuity. Posing in front of the neoclassical government building serves two functions: it showcases the political and cultural currency of ancient Greek culture in the United States while simultaneously advancing the immigrant claim to ownership of the cultural capital of classical Greece.10 The narrative of continuity and the adoption of ancient Greek political culture by the host society support the articulation of an ideological commonplace in Greek America: the persistent claim of the compatibility, even confluence, of American and Greek cultures. As the racial descendants and, by the principles of biological determinism, the cultural inheritors of classical Greece, Greek immigrants not only were endowed with the potential to embrace “Americanness” but also had access to “Ur-Americanness.”
The popularization of a resonance between an immigrant minority and its host, however, becomes politically possible on the basis of discontinuity. A banner announcing the “Upcoming Victory of the Allies”—conspicuously displayed at the upper center of the photograph—subtly redirects the interpretive framework. Read in the context of war politics, which promoted assimilation and framed the immigrant desire for political and social inclusion in American society, this sign marks a shift in the way in which immigrants saw themselves as political subjects. As historian Ioanna Laliotou (2004) shows, immigrants eagerly capitalized on Fourth of July parades as ideal public forums in which to reconfigure their political identification and proclaim their loyalty to America during a time of war. In this manner, the ideology of ethnic continuity was retained, but the narrative of national continuity was disrupted. On the one hand, the visual display of ancient Greek and vernacular forms pointed to “the cultural and civilizational value inherent in Greek descent” (124) and, therefore, to ethnic filiation. The performance of immigrant loyalty and belonging to the adopted homeland, on the other hand, served a denationalizing function. The declaration of political and social commitment to U.S. interests denationalized Greek history, since the display of Greek cultural symbols in the parades ceased to “operate as symbolic representations of national existence and sovereignty” (ibid.). Rather, their meaning was contained as depoliticized ethnic manifestations “of high cultural and ideological traits that were supposedly inherently embodied by Greek migrants” (124–25). Until the postwar rise of American nationalism, it was possible for the immigrants to publicly deploy a dual mode of identification for popular consumption. This investment in making the ethnic past conform with political expectations of Americanness was “based on the condition that America could accommodate transnational forms of identification” (125). But soon a militant assimilationism and exclusionist nativism coerced immigrants to rewrite their connections with their cherished pasts.
The site represented in the photograph is one among many—the home, the coffeehouse, the church, the workplace, the community, theatrical plays, regional societies, histories and folklore monographs, ethnic media, literature, intellectual and artistic societies—where early Greek immigrants negotiated the place of their pasts in America. The photograph simultaneously represents an instance of transnational continuity and a rupture from the ancestral nation-state as the primary site of attachment. The visual expression of ethnic continuity certainly imports the Greek state’s ideology, which, in the context of nation building, sought to integrate unlettered peasants into the grand narrative of the nation. Often told, most notably by Michael Herzfeld, this story of producing the folk as national subjects who embody the glorious ancient past redirects how we gaze at the photograph.
The immigrants at the U.S. Treasury perform a scripted version of the past, as it was produced at the time by Greek academic discourses, such as folklore, and by cultural movements, such as demoticism, both of which nationalized the vernacular. As folklorist and classicist Margaret Alexiou (1984–85) observes, the elevation of the peasants into a crucial component of national history must be seen in relation to political contingencies associated with the foundation of the modern Greek state early in the nineteenth century. “Only after the establishment of the Greek state, was the word laos used increasingly to mean ‘people’ in the Herderian sense of Volk, as carriers of the eternal spirit (pneuma) of the Greek nation (ethnos), whose values are transmitted ‘in the blood’” (14–15). The performance of immigrants posing in folk costumes constituted a modern folkness embedded in complex political histories and struggles to establish a nation-state and nationhood. It is necessary, therefore, to situate the representation captured in the photograph both historically and in relation to social discourses on Greek identity. In what follows, I will take a brief detour to discuss how the academic discipline of folklore construed the place of folk culture and the classical past in narratives of national identity and, in turn, how these narratives sought to contain the variability that defined peasant cultural expressions.
In the context of nineteenth-century Greek nation building and European power relations, turning the folk into national subjects served key political purposes. This explains the ideological significance of Greek folklore as a national institution whose production of truths about ordinary people was placed at the service of the state’s cultural politics. The systematic study of peasant culture was politically crucial at the time because it sought to legitimize the newly established nation-state. Greek folklore scholarship was staunchly empirical, yet ideologically invested in establishing an uninterrupted continuity between the ordinary people of the Greek countryside and ancient Greece. Selective customs and folk beliefs became the functioning link between the so-called golden past and the present, the latter envisioned by Western-trained Greek intellectuals and statesmen as a resurrection of the former. Long scorned and derided by the urban bourgeois, the practices of the folk, the laos, served as irrefutable evidence of racial purity, a sign that the spirit of Periclean Athens was transmuted into the greatness of folk poetry and song. Hence the name of the new discipline, laografia, the study of people (the Volk), instead of ethnografia, the study of the ethnos (the nation). As Michael Herzfeld (1986a) points out in his groundbreaking work on the politics of Greek folklore studies, it was necessary for the new discipline to prove that the folk constituted an organic part of the nation, that they “indeed belonged to the Hellenic ethnos” (13). “The ethnos,” Herzfeld writes, “did not need a branch of study of its own: it was one of the eternal verities, an absolute moral entity against which the laos could be matched and measured” (ibid.). By establishing the Hellenicity of the peasants, folklore scholarship legitimized the claim of the Greek nation-state to the cultural and intellectual legacy of ancient Greece. Such reasoning carried far-reaching political implications. If Hellas stood “as the cultural exemplar of Europe” (5), to claim that modern Greeks were racial and cultural descendants of ancient Greece was to declare their access to an Ur-European identity. The prestigious pedigree of the peasants carried inherent political implications. “Against the background of the Greeks’ dependence on European patronage” (6–7), Herzfeld writes, the claim to racial and cultural ancestry substantiated the European identity of the Greeks and made them eligible for European political and material support.
Seen against this historical background, the photograph testifies to the power of the discourse of Western Hellenism to shape the national and transnational expression of Greek immigrant identity. But it also demonstrates the immigrant performance of a larger, preemigration process of cultural containment. In nineteenth-century Greece, the state-sponsored nationalization